[tied] Re: Creole Romance? [was: Thracian , summing up]

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> Creole grammars don't start from scratch (unless you are a follower
> of Chomsky or Psammetik). They start from the grammar of the native
> language of the new speaker.

I thought Psammetik's experiment did not produce grammatical speech,
just a single word, 'bekos'.

> Any encyclopedia article on a Romance language will tell you: "the
> first text in Romance language X is ... in the year ...". It seems

to

> me there is assumed to be a break here.

The break is that this is the earliest text where the author doesn't
think he is writing in Latin, i.e. in most cases it represents a
conscious decision to use the vernacular.

> Next question: why, as I think Brian Scott is saying, when you try
> look past the invective, fix it when it ain't broke? The reason is
> that although much of Latin grammar survives, much is also lost,

plus

> a whole new type of past forms are introduced, those based
> on 'habeo', strangely a similar construction exists in Germanic.

And in Modern Greek. The Celts and Slavs are alleged not to have
adopted this construction because they don't have grammatically
similar words for 'have'.

Presumably the Italic languages, or at least Latin and Faliscan, are
creolses because they have a new formation for the imperfect. Don't
some classical Greek dialects also have a new formation for the
imperfect? Ionian and -isk- come to mind, but I may very well be
wrong about these details.

> Don't forget that we know from Jerome that they still
> spoke Celtic around Trier long after the empire collapsed.

Didn't he also say that it was similar to the language spoken in
Galatia in Asia Minor? There are actually very few traces of Celtic
ever being spoken there. Both statements are seriously disputed.

Richard.